Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

It was understandable how a pretty girl could be taken up, then dropped, or not listened to, or accepted into something for all the wrong reasons, or be perceived as being something she wasn’t, or treated as purely ornamental, and that must carry its own class of loneliness.

  Then again, thought Jessie, it’s like the I’ve-been-rich-and-I’ve-been-poor-and-rich-is-better problem. Who cries for the pretty girl? Isn’t that why she has to cry for herself?

  “Let’s go find Cymbeline,” she said.

  As they walked back through the cottage, to the garden where Cymbeline waited, Ibis said, “I’m sorry,” though Jessie didn’t have to ask why. In the same way she didn’t have to ask if Emile slept with Ibis. She knew that Emile was sleeping with Ibis; Emile slept with them all.

  • • •

  The photograph was playful. Ibis, a happy nudist, stood in beautiful contrast with the dark-clothed Cymbeline, her beloved Rollei dangling from her neck, her white hair escaping her bandanna, her sandals and socks and surprise at coming upon such a lovely creature, a nymph in her unkempt garden, the girl as surprised and curious to see Cymbeline as Cymbeline is to see her.

  One was short, one was tall, one was a photographer, one was a model, one was old, one was young, one was clothed, one was nude. Jessie used Emile’s Rolleiflex, speaking to the women as she peered down into the viewing screen, the camera no longer between her and her subjects. For the first time, Jessie felt not only calm but content. It was one of those moments of perfect happiness, all the more wonderful because it was unexpected.

  It was so perfect, in fact, that when Emile’s knock on the front door broke into the flawless choreography of the afternoon, no one was moved to answer it.

  GOOD NIGHT KISS OR CRESCENT MOON #4

  Stellamare was the sort of small town that wasn’t exactly charming unless you considered pushing against any kind of encroachment of late-twentieth-century modernity “charming.” Mostly, it was inconvenient, slightly eccentric, often insular. It was nestled in the wine country of Northern California, in the midst of other, more promising towns, which is why Stellamare wasn’t anyone’s destination. Paradoxically, it was this general lack of interest that transformed it into a kind of travel trophy for the wine tourist always on the search for a “discovery.” By the early 1980s the wine country above San Francisco was so overrun by visitors who glamorized agriculture according to its crop (grapes = sexy; cabbage = not), and fetishized enology and viticulture, that a casual mention of any “out-of-the-way village” at a dinner party was the perfect little conversational bagatelle, a souvenir if you will, that set you apart from your fellow winophiles.

  None of this changed the basic fact that Stellamare was a rural, dual-class region of weekenders and workers, with the workers being mostly Hispanic and the weekenders being mostly not-Hispanic. The townspeople shared traits with both groups.

  Everyone in and outside of Stellamare knew the local banker, Wallace Westerbrooke Lux, a graduate of Stanford and Yale who’d served in World War II and had the world at his feet upon obtaining his degrees in economics and finance (with lucrative job offers in San Francisco and New York) but chose to open up a farmers’ bank in Stellamare.

  His business sense was unerring, even though at times his practices seemed counterintuitive and unorthodox. However, the people with whom he dealt felt him to be a reliable and honorable man. When asked why he’d settled so far from the financial thick of things, he said that money had its charms but his heart belonged to gardening. And to the construction of the occasional odd little assemblage (bones, claws, jewels), often under a glass dome or arranged inside a box.

  Summerplace, Wallace Westerbrooke Lux’s farm (or garden—it was referred to as both), was extravagant by anyone’s standards, with its mix of trees imported from China and India, Japan and Italy, the Middle East and the American South. There were native palms. A rare East African tree. There were an orange grove and fountains and wild strawberries. A garden of blue flowers (lilies, delphiniums, plumbagos, violets, Johnny-jump-ups, musk sage, lavender) and foliage plants (Agave americana, Agave franzosinii, Brahea armata, the atlas cedar). Thousands of pieces of luminous blue sea glass, their edges worn by tides, marked the paths.

  There was a white garden of such strong perfume it felt enchanted, and a silver garden of dusty miller. Bougainvillea, climbing roses, cacti. Ornamental plums and cherries; lotuses the size of tabletops floating on pools large enough for swimming. An enormous working clock, planted in patterns of the zodiac. A Japanese garden with an orange moon bridge; a stepped, grassy amphitheater where the Lux children performed plays and concerts and poetry recitations.

  Cycads, ancient, rare, and as expensive as emerald bracelets, composed a garden that looked prehistoric (“the dinosaur place,” said the Lux children); it was next to a bromeliad garden that was like a mysterious jungle, the sun dappling the dirt floor.

  There was a natural pool. And a pool to swim in and a pool to sit beside and a shallow pool the color of a summer sky surrounded by a sandy beach and studded with giant clamshells.

  The air of Summerplace was fragrant with the smells of eucalyptus, jasmine, orange blossom, roses, cut grass, and earth. Scents that always brought Jenny Lux, Wallace’s only daughter, back to her youth.

  At night, without the interference of the reflected city lights, the sky spilled diamonds. Late summer was a show of shooting stars, a million wishes made through Jenny’s life on those falling stars.

  As the beauty and artistic reach of Mr. Lux’s garden increased, so did his reputation as an eccentric. No one could understand a moneyman with compassion, nor could they fathom why someone with a keen understanding of the bottom line would choose to turn an expensive California wine country parcel into thirty-nine acres of sheer folly.

  • • •

  Over time, the idiosyncrasies of the garden attached themselves to whoever lived at Summerplace, pegging the entire family as eccentric, and no one more so than Jenny, the youngest of the six children. She was a pretty girl who never behaved like a pretty girl, with her marvelous hazel eyes, luminous really, and clear skin that never quite tanned beyond a slightly darkened cream, despite her outdoor pursuits. Her bobbed hair was an adequate shade of brown, its thick, springy texture responsible for its attractiveness. All the Luxes had the same build: average height and lithe. Jenny’s five brothers, her mother, her father almost seemed “too related,” her parents appearing nearly as members of the same biological family. Their loving and devoted marriage was also cause for suspicion. This, naturally, gave rise to more speculation and gossip, which was countered only by the general gratitude the townspeople felt toward Mr. Lux and Mrs. Lux, who always seemed generous with their business expertise (Mr. Lux) or time (Mrs. Lux) or money (Mr. and Mrs. Lux).

  The natural beauty of their daughter drew the boys; then, when they got to know her a little, baffled the boys. Their expectations, such as they were at that age, went unmet, with the boys too unworldly (yet) to readjust them with regard to this splendid, slightly wild girl.

  Her wildness was more animal in nature and not limited to sexuality. Her father had not raised her to “be a girl,” which is how Jenny Lux would’ve put it had she thought of it in those terms. That is, Mr. Lux obviously raised her as he thought a girl should be raised, but his parenting style was clearly not in accord with either their community or the times. When feminism came to the fore in her late teens, early twenties, Jenny quite honestly didn’t know what to think about it. Had she been treated differently from her brothers, had her ambitions been calibrated to account for her female lot in life, had she been told that there were limits, or somehow taught that women were more effective when they used charm, a little subterfuge, feminine wiles, then perhaps she wouldn’t have confused her suitors. In short, she didn’t know what she didn’t know.

  Another thing that set her apart: She meant what she said and said it plainly and without a lilt in her voice; there was no trace of that girlish, self-questioning s
peech pattern. Even the boys who were most captivated by her would not have described her as charming. It’s a fallacy that no one wants to “play games” or that they wish for someone to dispense with guile, because the truth is that they live for the game. Someone who doesn’t “play games” is someone who doesn’t know the rules. It was this lack that made her not only different but suspect.

  If she liked a boy, she told him. If they went out, she often made the first move, and, when she didn’t, she was a willing participant. Not if she didn’t like the boy, but then she rarely went out with someone she didn’t already like a little.

  The unpredictable aspect of all this was that Jenny didn’t gain the reputation of an easy girl. If she was involved with someone—even casually—there was no bragging, no smearing of her name around school. It wouldn’t occur to her that anyone would want to do that, to anyone. Social mores, by the time she was in high school, in the mid-1960s, were changing so quickly that it was change as much as a cataclysm, but the small American towns lagged years behind. In some of those towns it wasn’t 1967, it was 1957 and all that went with that. Girls still wanted to be cheerleaders to the boys who wanted to be football heroes.

  Jenny was unconsciously liberated enough to know that she didn’t know what she wanted to be. And that was the most dangerous thing of all.

  Nothing Jenny Lux did was much of an issue because the townspeople (weekenders and workers) liked having Summerplace to talk about as something that gave their little village distinction. Every town had vineyards and wineries and tasting rooms and at least one restaurant that served wild, grape-fed boar on couscous, but none of them had Summerplace.

  The weekenders and the townspeople told and retold stories of the six Lux children, unsupervised, shoeless, often in shorts and nothing else, including Jenny, who spent much of her childhood running wild through the fanciful landscape her father created. Her companions were rarely her brothers—a quintet of pragmatists less dream-driven than their sister—instead she could be found keeping company with the family’s four Portuguese water dogs and a lone blond cairn terrier, a male dog with a mercurial personality (five stand-ins for her five brothers). The dogs had individual names, but because they were a fairly inseparable pack, they all answered to the each other’s names, which is to say, they all answered to the same name. Eventually, the family dispensed with all but one name, Linus, and it worked out very well. Even the one female in the group was Linus. It wasn’t until Jenny was in kindergarten that she learned the breed of the dog was Portuguese water dog and not Linus.

  The townspeople thought Jenny was feral.

  She thought she was feral too.

  Sometimes she waded in the sky blue water of a pool while the dogs lazed on the white sand beach with its giant clamshells. Other days she could be seen napping among them under a live oak. Or they would walk the perimeter of the property together, Jenny in the midst of the pack. Her father, they said, indulged her every whim, including allowing her to stay home from school two days a week to explore “art.” The school principal said, “It’s always unacceptable to keep children home if they aren’t ill. Some parents”—she sniffed—“think they know best.” Never mind that Jenny was at the top of her class, well-read, and whip smart in science and math. Never mind that she was a thoughtful, observant child who loved nature in the best possible way, that is to say that she allowed it to be what it was without imposing her will upon it. She seemed more interested in watching people or animals or events than in interacting with them, or controlling them. Never mind her natural curiosity.

  When she was older, it wasn’t uncommon to see Jenny setting up her father’s 1956 Rolleiflex 2.8D camera, sometimes with a tripod, sometimes using the light meter she often had in her pocket, studying her surroundings until something caught her attention. Always checking the watch she was never without, gazing up at the sky. She would ask people of Stellamare to pose, or train the old camera on plants or structures. All the other kids had new Kodak Instamatics, not expensive ten-year-old cameras meant for serious photography, asking more of the photographer than to point and shoot, making it seem that Wallace Westerbrooke Lux was simply forcing his brand of unusual onto his daughter.

  The thing was, when the Luxes opened up their gardens one week a year for the public to tour (at the request of a women’s society that Mrs. Lux sometimes met with for charitable work; they were mostly affluent housewives, and seven days of being allowed into Summerplace proved quite lucrative), Wallace Westerbrooke Lux set up a tent displaying Jenny’s pictures, and everyone had to agree that you couldn’t quite take your eyes off of them.

  • • •

  When Mr. Lux died, and Mrs. Lux moved to live closer to her eldest son, in Florida, the beautiful, singular Jenny inherited the gardens and the animals of Summerplace. This turn of events pleased the townspeople, since nearly everyone had met Jenny Lux, giving their tales about Summerplace a little more authority when they spoke to tourists. They spoke with the tones of insiders, their stories touched with a kind of awe and a sniff of condescension.

  And when she married Abner Huxley, the townspeople simply folded him into their stories of Summerplace. In certain circumstances, they could also be protective toward Jenny and Summerplace, that is, until Sam Tsukiyama and those photographs. Suddenly, it was if Jenny had hoodwinked them into believing her harmless when she was a viper in their midst all along. Once the attention fell on Jenny Lux and her photographs, Summerplace suddenly seemed like a facade, a diversion from the activities within, masking something sinister.

  Jenny hadn’t had a lot of lovers by the time she met Abner Huxley, during the summer following her junior year at Stanford. Once she and Abner took up together, there was no one else for her. She would say, “I knew I wanted to be an artist and that I had to choose: I could have lovers with all my energy going into them, or I could use my time and attention in other ways. I chose other ways.”

  She replaced the Rolleiflex 2.8D that so puzzled the townspeople with an even older camera, a Seneca from 1909.

  “I look for imperfection,” she would say later, explaining why she would even bother to use such an old camera, let alone one that had clearly sustained some unusual damage. “Everything that moves me, or captivates me, can often be found in the space where things go wrong, or fall short.”

  The five-by-seven Seneca No. 9 was a camera that Mr. Lux had picked up in a used camera store called Schonneker’s Camera Emporium, located near Union Square, on a warm San Francisco day of intermittent clouds. When Wallace Westerbrooke Lux found himself with time on his hands between business meetings, he strolled in and around the square until he came to a funny little store with a Seneca Black Beauty displayed in its window. Inside he saw another Seneca, a No. 9, the leather a little singed, looking as if there was some damage to the lens, which the shopkeeper, Ed Schonneker, assured him would still take decent pictures. “Not perfect, you understand. After all, the camera is older than I am.”

  Ed Schonneker showed Mr. Lux how the bellows extended beyond the camera bed; he showed him the spirit level, the detailed industrial metal fittings, the revolving camera back along with the leather flap that opened like a door to reveal the ground glass viewfinder, showing the image upside down (“Laws of optics,” said Mr. Schonneker). “It can hold two glass plates,” he said, then demonstrated the use of the dark slide for exposures. The camera closed up into an elegant, little boxlike package, “for travel,” said Mr. Schonneker, “very compact dimensions.” He offered the closed camera to Mr. Lux to test the weight. “And,” he said, “you can make full-size prints, or postcard size. Of course, you do have to have an understanding of dry plates and dry-plate printing, but when you make a picture from one of these cameras, you are making a picture.”

  It was the chemistry of the plates and the promise of imperfection that swayed Mr. Lux. In his mind he saw Jenny, now fifteen and still enamored with the Rolleiflex, and understood that the mechanics and complexity of the Seneca
would intrigue her. He wasn’t sure what she wanted from photography, but he knew that whatever it was there was a greater chance of finding it in this anachronistic camera store than in a place lined with new Nikons. Nothing about that girl was predictable; he supposed that he would never know if it was nature or nurture, and so decided to simply accept it as what is. “Okay,” he said.

  As Ed Schonneker was writing up the ticket, he stopped. “Wait, I do have something else,” he said, and with that he disappeared into a back room.

  Mr. Lux wandered about the crowded store, studying the array of cameras. One was a massive old plate camera on a stand making it nearly as tall as he, with a lens the size of his hand. The box was a reddish hued wood, marred and dulled in spots. And then there were the handsome vintage wooden cameras looking impossibly new, their brass fittings as polished as the natural stained wood.

  There were Graflex cameras, black boxes with tall, black leather hoods that sprang up like jack-in-the-boxes. And newer Graflex Speed Graphics with round flashes, which he had seen in every vintage movie that showed a newspaper reporter. There were Rolleiflexes, so visually and mechanically flawless. Rolleicords, Kodak Retina Big and Small Cs that reminded him of family road trips through the Grand Canyon; Contessas, Contaxes, and Leicas of every vintage, in every imaginable condition. Panorama and pinhole cameras. There were strobes and leather camera bags, and lenses. Tripods and glass plates and film backs for sheet film. Sets of lens filters in green, red, yellow, and blue.

  All these cameras, these tiny “rooms” of light and shadow; these beautiful machines that produced the stuff of dreams. They were so appealing in their construction and appearance that Mr. Lux realized he desired them in the same way he coveted a painting or a sculpture.

  Many of the store’s wares were on shelves behind the counters, or in the vitrine, or lying about—an indication that the owner either trusted his clientele or didn’t care what disappeared from his vast collection.